Yet despite its striving for the reality effect, Straight Outta Compton begins much like a summer blockbuster from the Marvel universe, introducing its quickly characterized superheroes one after another: pugnacious, fast-talking drug-runner Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), dutiful son and sonic dreamer Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), and smoldering, watchful scribbler Ice Cube. Once these legendary figures team up and unite their uncanny powers, it’s only a matter of time before something becomes airborne: the camera, in this case, which at the literal and figurative high point of Straight Outta Compton dives over the heads of the crowd at a Detroit arena, swoops around the stage where NWA is performing “Fuck tha Police,” and soars back out again.
This is F. Gary Gray’s directorial ecstasy, which comes rather too early in the proceedings for the movie’s good. Liberated by NWA’s full-throated denunciation of police racism, and especially by the group’s defiance of police orders never to perform that number, Gray leaves the Earth behind and brings you along with him. After that, you’ve got about a two-hour slog left, through contract disputes, management problems, professional rivalries, and a lot of standard-issue showbiz parties.
But the memory of the flight over the Detroit arena remains; and if you see The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, it might connect with another moment of defiance and liberation. In December 1966, just four days after the execution of Fred Hampton, Los Angeles police deployed their recently organized SWAT team in its first major raid, targeting a Panther headquarters. This time the Panthers were awake and prepared. Objectively, the best that can be said for their resistance is that the ensuing four-hour standoff ended with all of them alive, though in police custody. No newly flourishing headquarters sprang up in the ruins that the SWAT team left behind. Nationally, in fact, the Panthers were heading toward schism, disarray, and effective demise, on what turned out to be a three-year schedule. But for at least one of the party members in that siege, Wayne Pharr, the shoot-out was a peak moment never before experienced. “I felt free,” he says.